You may have heard of the Nintendo Switch, but your friends probably haven't

Nintendo's got a big fan club, so when the venerable gaming company releases a new machine, you'd think people would be paying attention.

But that's not necessarily been the case with its new console, the Switch. Although the device went on sale in March, and Nintendo's been talking about it for more than two years, relatively few people are aware of it.

Fewer than a quarter of U.S. consumers polled in the first quarter of this year had heard of the Switch, as this chart from Statista, based on arecent Nielsen study, indicates. Even among self-professed gamers, awareness was low; less than a third had heard of the new console.

The Switch isn't the only new game machine that's gained little awareness from consumers. The vast majority of both gamers and consumers as a whole have never heard of either Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro -- a "mid-cycle" update to the original PlayStation 4 -- or “Project Scorpio,” Microsoft's forthcoming update to the Xbox One.

It's hard to get people to switch if they haven't even heard of your product.